Accelerators development for intraoperative radiation therapy

The "intraoperative radiation therapy" (IORT) consists in delivering a single high dose on a tumour bed soon after surgery resection. The "IORT Project", funded by the Italian Ministry of Research (MURST), was started in 1998 from ENEA (Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and the Environment) and is aimed to design and construct two innovative IORT systems (named IORT-1 and IORT-2) equipped with advanced treatment planning and real time dosimetry. These developments will improve the present IORT-NOVAC7 system, jointly developed in the latest years from ENEA and the Italian Hitesys Company. In the paper the advance status of the project is described and IORT-1 experimental results are presented with particular attention to innovative technical aspects of these new generation IORT accelerators.